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I have been running Mint 14 64bit with the cinnamon desktop for about a month now after years of being a Windows user. So far I have enjoyed the minty freshness of Mint (I'm sure you know what I mean).

Anyway, last night I ran the Update Manager and told it to install whatever it thought it needed. Nothing like keeping your system up to date right?

Since then the desktop has turned to rubbish. When I first boot in, there is no task bar. Next, if I press the Windows key (this key needs a better name) the menu opens but it is just text with no background color. Finally, nothing works. If can get my mouse pointer to Firefox i can get it to open. If I try to move the window, it just turns white all over and becomes unresponsive. From then on, nothing works. I can't even get to the shut down button.

I'm hoping to find a solution to this before my download of Fedora 18 finishes, if you get my drift. First however I need to see if I can get in to this busted piece of junk and back up my stuff..

I'm hoping there is a solution to this. I have invested hours / days into setting this up they way I like and have learned along the way. but this issue is beyond my skill set.

Well, in the 90 minutes since I posted the message above, I booted into the live Mint CD, mounted my hard drives, and with a bit of chmod, was able to copy all my stuff from what was my home folder on sda1 to a folder on sdb1.

Well, I gave Mint 14 a month or so of my time.. Here are my observations.

1. When I first installed it, I could plug in my Canon 7D, gThumbs would open and I could get images off it. Just like nature intended. One day a couple of weeks ago, this stopped working. Some USB error 'could not mount device' or some such nonsence. I have no idea why.

2. Thunderbird would open and work just fine, but if I closed it I could not open it a 2nd time as it was 'already running'. Very annoying.

3. Despite the fact that I got the latest ATI Catalyst drivers installed for my ATI 6800 card, got rid of the stupid ATI test watermark and had the Catalyst control panel working etc, no game would run. All resulted in a black screen. These included but not limited to...

- Team Fortress 2 (native) that I downloaded from Steam. - Diablo 3 - with the help of Wine and PlayOnLinux- Everquest 2 - Running in Windows 7 in a Virtual Box VM with the 'experimental' Direct X drivers. - Trine 2 (native) paid for and downloaded from Steam